The Oakland Tribune

Sunday, October 1, 1989

Emeryville Boom: Whole city is one big redevelopment area

By Larry Spears

The Tribune

EMERYVILLE — When City Councilman Tom Fox calls this city a "chic and happening place," he says it with a straight face. He means it, too.

For years a grimy, industrial, smudge of brick, smoke and soot on the southeastern foot of the Bay Bridge, Emeryville has grown trendy and upscale. It's growing so fast, some residents say, that it may have to slow down.

Emeryville suffered from a murky image in the early 1980s, when its school district faced bankruptcy, and citizens were forcing out political baron John Lacoste and the high-rising bay front development plans of the Pacific Union company.

Now, Emeryville is where you can go to buy edible flowers and radicchio, eat at fashionable restaurants, attend the Bay Area's largest jazz club or catch a film at the biggest theater complex in Northern California.

The Powell Street Plaza, the only regional shopping center between Hayward and Richmond, has filled 24 of its 25 store spaces.

Emeryville may rival Berkeley in cappuccino consumed per capita. Magazines like Elan, M and Smart line the newsstand racks at the EmeryBay Marketplace.

The Town House, the old wood-plank country music tavern from which Lacoste once ran the town, reopens in December as a French-style restaurant.

In the Marketplace, shoppers find specialty delicatessens and natural-food stores, ethnic restaurants. gelato and something called "Designer" coffee beans.

Emeryville is a Bay Area center for artists. They make up nearly one-tenth of Emeryville's 5,500 citizens.

The city sets aside 1 percent of its construction money for public buildings for art. It's commissioning sculpture for the new $1 million fire station. The council plans to broaden the policy to privately financed projects.

In three years, developer David Martin's company has put in $300 million in residential and business projects along the bay front area west of I-80, on land bought from trucking outfits.

The whole city — 1.2 square miles — is a redevelopment area. It's building parks, replacing sewers, planning a new $20 million street route and offering low-cost rehabilitation loans to residents of the older neighborhoods around San Pablo Avenue.

Last year's redevelopment budget was $18 million. Martin estimates that his company's projects alone are giving the city the vehicle for $50 million in redevelopment bonds.

"We're trying to go from the 1920s to the 1980s in four or five years." said Fox.

"This used to be a gray town," said Molly Stone, partner in a glass-blowing firm, whose one-of-a-kind works are internationally successful. "Now it's full of life."

Four years ago, Kathleen Doyle started the city's first trendy new cafe in a brick industrial building two blocks from Powell Street. "There were no businesses around me" she remembered. "Now, there are 20."

At first, she did a weekday luncheon business drawing from Emeryville's swelling work force.

The city's daytime population reaches 30,000. Its 1,000 businesses splice genes, engineer computers, forge steel rods, make mustard, run card games, turn pottery and offer the only federally licensed massage training in California.

Two years ago, Doyle helped organize the Emeryville Hollis Street Stroll to acquaint people with the town's neighborhood shops and artisans. So many people came that she opened Saturdays and Sundays. Now, those are her busiest days.

"The majority of people come from out of the area," Doyle said.

The new bay front shopping center areas, said Martin Group partner Tom Graham, draw most customers from surrounding cities and the Berkeley hills.

The 3,600-seat, 10-screen EmeryBay Theater complex, said United Artists Vice President Larry Lovin, pulls customers from Contra Costa County and the San Francisco side of the bridge.

Kimball Allen said his jazz club nearby gets half its listeners from across the bridge.

The theater's success has made it a magnet for the area. "When they opened 'Sex, Lies and Videotape,' it really helped our business," 'said Emeryville Mayor Ken Bukowski, owner of a Marketplace brew pub and restaurant.

The Marketplace, open less than a year, still is struggling. The Powell Street Plaza, says developer Martin, is succeeding beyond expectations.

Emeryville's task, its citizens agree, is controlling the snowballing growth, dealing with such impacts as traffic gridlock, and figuring out how to divide the benefits among the city's communities.

Emeryville's population, in the 1980 census, was 58 percent white, 28 percent black and 14 percent others.

More than half live in new developments, condominiums like Watergate on the peninsula west of I-80 and the Pacific Park Plaza tower east at the freeway, and the new EmeryBay Club and Apartments north of the Marketplace.

East, on the other side of the Southern Pacific tracks, lies the other, older, grimier but regenerating Emeryville. Part of it holds smaller new apartment, condominium and live-work spaces. Further east, into the Triangle on the other side of San Pablo Avenue, lie blocks of older, blue-collar, single-family houses.

Economically, the 113-year-old town also divides between old and new. White-red molten metal still glows at night from the ports of the Barbary Coast Steel Corporation.

Residents complain about the odors from Myers Container Corporation, which the Bay Area Air Quality Management District cited in July for emitting 2.5 times the permitted level of phenol.

Embodying the new Emeryville is the world's second largest biotech firm, Cetus, and the sixth largest, Chiron, which share space at the new Emeryville Research & Development Center. Chiron is expanding into an adjacent three-building complex called the EmeryBay Research Park.

When Sybase, the steamrolling data-base firm, expands into a former 130,000-square-Loot post office distribution center, Emeryville's bay front east of the freeway will be completely redeveloped between the boundaries with Oakland and Berkeley.

The Martin Group is putting a Marriott Hotel next to the Powell Street Plaza and plans to rebuild the old Del Monte plant into housing units. It has sold a Powell Street plot to a company which will build a Hawthorne Suites hotel.

The other large-scale developer is Richard Robbins, a founder of Wareham Development. He built Emeryville's first live-in artists' studios, the Research & Development Center and the Heritage Square business area.

Wareham wants to develop the old 152,460-square-foot Chevron site and empty 240,000-square-foot Westinghouse plant, which presents the problem of being a toxic Superfund cleanup site.

City Councilman Greg Harper is among those who think the city may have to slow down. "Before we go much further," he said, "we're going to have to build some streets, parking, parks and other things that go with development."

Powell Street, the city's single direct-freeway access to its bay front development, often is jammed at commute time. The city plans a $27 million north-south route linking Bay and Shellmound streets that would cross the SP tracks and connect eastward with Yerba Buena to San Pablo Avenue.

That would give more access to the Powell Street Plan area and serve the new massive commercial development planned by Santa Fe Pacific Realty for the strip from San Pablo west along I-580.

"I don't see who that area can support much additional traffic," said Harper.

Emeryville does not want for issues. Residents complain that they need more basic commercial services, such as a full-size supermarket and pharmacy. Sculptor Scott Donahue, head of the Emeryville artists' cooperative, hopes for some relief from neo-industrial architecture.

Deputy City Manager Steve Belcher predicts East Emeryville will prosper from a revitalization of San Pablo Avenue.

A new Standard Brands paint outlet has moved onto the street, the Oaks card club plans a 15,000-square-foot expansion, the city will build a $4 million, 50-unit senior residential center and Santa Fe is expected to build up its street frontage.

The city, observes Mayor Bukowski, is pouring redevelopment money into neighborhood projects. It plans a park of 3 acres on Stanford Avenue between Hollis and Vallejo Streets, of 2.5 acres on Christie Avenue near the Marketplace, and a fenced 3.5-acre open space on 48th Street.

It's building a $1.4 million child-care center to handle 114 children, a $6.5 million city hall on Hollis Street between Stanford and 53rd Street, and a $1.8 million fire station on the Watergate peninsula.

The city is offering $1.3 million in housing-rehabilitation loans, has planted 1,000 trees in residential neighborhoods and is replacing every sewer in East Emeryville, including the hook-ups to houses.

"The whole city," said Belcher, "is a work in progress."